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Hey, Apple, Fear The ‘Intelligence’ In AI

Friday, March 16, 2018

Apple has a good thing going because an increasing number of technology gadget toting humanity has developed both an affinity and a trust for the company’s growing line of products. Despite forays and resulting profits from applications, music, and videos, Apple remains a hardware company. Yet, we all know that Apple– thanks to Siri’s undeserved popularity– is working on AI. Artificial intelligence.

I’m here to tell you we need to fear the ‘intelligence’ in AI, whether from Apple, Microsoft, Google or whomever or whatever.

Fear? Why? Skynet and Terminator? No. At least, not yet. The time when AI intelligence becomes sentient and decides humanity’s greatest threat is humanity itself may come– perhaps soon– but not yet. There are fewer signs that AI has much intelligence; at least, as evidenced by Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google’s stupidly named but human sounding Assistant.

In a strange coincidence, one of my favorite technology columnists agrees with me. Yes, none other than John C. Dvorak thinks the intelligence in AI isn’t all that smart, and that’s exactly what has me scared about the future of humanity and AI.

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing devices called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things.

Yes, that John C. Dvorak, and while I agree that we really don’t see much human-like intelligence in artificial intelligence, the very fact that Dvorak doesn’t see it either makes me wonder if there is more there than we think.

Dvorak’s experience with a Microsoft bot designed to help customers walk through a problem and get to a solution is hilarious and we’ve all been there. Worth reading.

It is probably unfair to slam this “preview/trainee” virtual assistant, but it’s only too apparent that all the talk of artificial intelligence is just bloviation.

We’ve all experienced the maddening trials of trying to get something accomplished online– and that’s just with websites that should be easy to monitor and track users– only to leave the site or hang up the phone in disgust.

Yes, our teenager does not understand what ‘hang up the phone‘ means. Have we traveled that far into the future?

Dvorak’s experience with Microsoft’s support bot ended in a human-like way.

I have no idea what problems this thing ever solved, but I know that while writing this column and going through the process a second time, the robot trainee became unavailable and could not be summoned.

While I agree with Dvorak that the artificially intelligent beings that inhabit many of our technology devices are more artificial than intelligent, the fact that he thinks they’re not all that smart tells me to be careful about tomorrow.

Dvorak:

Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone. What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget.

If a guy who wrote that tells you we have little to fear about the intelligence in AI, what should you do?

Intelligence is like good taste. If you don’t have it, you don’t miss it.

Right.

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